Manufacturing Intranet Portal

Modernization of critical SharePoint based enterprise software platform for improved employee productivity and collaboration

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A large candy manufacturer from the United States relies on SharePoint for its employee collaboration initiatives. The purpose of this portal is to inform, train and educate employees. Being a business that creates high volume, creative products for children, the company relies heavily on new ideas and innovation fostered from within its employee and partner base to consistently bring new products to the market and stay a step ahead of competition. The SharePoint-based intranet portal was called New Product Initiative, or NPI. NPI allowed the employees to put up ideas for new products, which then went through various feasibility studies and approval cycles that involved other corporate teams including product, manufacturing, marketing and finance. While the company had a process for this communication, the adoption of the current portal by employees fell short of company’s expectations due to rigid legacy architecture and lack of streamlined process and automation. Lack of optimum integration points, performance issues and a subpar user experience caused inefficient usage and hurdles in collaboration between teams.

The Vatsa Solution: Improving performance and user experience of SharePoint based system

The company’s management wanted to modernize this business-critical application and approached Vatsa to perform a due diligence. The due diligence process surfaced key insights and bottlenecks related to the usability of the portal and workflows. It was decided that using the Microsoft environment was the most optimum because it utilized the existing infrastructure, had a great price-to-performance ratio and provided a robust roadmap with strong integrations for future enhancements. Vatsa used SharePoint designer and improved the overall portal experience by creating a new look and feel. As an important step and to address the key insights that had surfaced, Vatsa also redesigned the site navigation and user experience to introduce layers of activity that aligned with organizational goals and the innovation process, and created workflows for data collection and information validation that drove the product ideation process. These workflows provided review points and designated approval hierarchies as forms and other documents that traced an idea seamlessly from the beginning to its logical conclusion. Superior user experience, and seamless workflows with appropriate roles, alerts and reminders were the key highlights of the transformational improvements that Vatsa brought to the engagement.

Results:

The company has been in manufacturing business for nearly 100 years. With increasing pace of business and rising competition, introducing new product ideas continuously was identified as a critical differentiator for the company. Vatsa brought its full-stack expertise on Microsoft technologies to transform the existing portals and business processes with superior performance and user experience. This resulted in:

1) Vastly improved ideation process powered by automated workflows and seamless interworking of all SharePoint and NPI components
2) An order of magnitude improvement in employee adoption and usage of the new NPI system, with it becoming the primary source of communication for the entire innovation process
3) Adoption of NPI by the core product team for its own internal usage and innovation in addition to new ideas coming from employees at large, resulting in dramatically increased productivity of staff across the board
4) A robust system that is a durable competitive differentiator and core competency that is hard to replicate for others in the industry

Technology and Tools:

SharePoint Designer, SharePoint InfoPath Designer

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